Forty Minutes of Hell: The Extraordinary Life of Nolan Richardson

If you are a Coach Richardson fan, you will find this book quite interesting. A book you can sit down and read in no time. After reading you will understand that all he has said through the years is true.

Rus Bradburd's telling of the life (so far) of legendary basketball coach Nolan Richardson is partly a basketball story, from a junior college in hardscrabble West Texas to Final Fours and a national championship at Arkansas. More importantly, though, it's the story of a man from a poor neighborhood in El Paso fighting through daunting obstacles to achieve the pinnacle of success in a place where many wished him to fail, and the scars left by those battles. Perhaps most importantly, this book tells the story of a nation's struggles with racism, both subtle and overt, over the last half-century. Because of people like Nolan Richardson, much progress can be seen; as Bradburd's book makes clear, however, fear and bigotry remain alarmingly present in our country. This is an important book, for basketball fans and non-fans alike.

I couldn't care less about basketball, but I loved this book. Basketball is simply a lens - a brilliant lens in Bradburd's expert hands - through which the author examines fifty years of racial relations, politics, history and civil rights struggle. Nolan Richardson is a fascinating character -- complicated, visionary, driven, irascible. At times he appears the most disciplined man alive and at others, out of control. He is portrayed as utterly human in dealing with a doomed marriage, a sick child or school politics. At the same time, he can become larger than life in breaking barriers and attaining impressive firsts on and off the court. His story, America's story in the second half of the last century, is full of heroism and flaws, anger and compassion. This is an epic story, and you don't need to like basketball to find Nolan's story riveting any more than you need to love war to find yourself transfixed by Achilles'.

"Forty Minutes of Hell" is great reading, even for the non-sports fan. Nolan Richardson's life is a saga of grit, determination, and basketball coaching brilliance with no compromise of personal integrity. Bradburd's account of this multi-championship winning coach is thorough and as fast-paced as Richardson's famous game. Richardson's controversial statements about race are not ducked. In fact the book begins with his famous/infamous press conference at the University of Arkansas in 2002 which was a prequel to his termination there. Like any hero, Richardson is not perfect, and Bradburd doesn't gloss over Richardson's mistakes. The El Paso chapters will surprise many readers--it's a city with a rich basketball tradition, alongside its Mexican-dominant culture and its prescient civil rights litigation. What Nolan Richardson has accomplished is truly amazing--coaching the winning teams of all three major college basketball titles and storming his outspoken way into sports history.